Fascist Modernist Landscapes: Wheat, Dams, Forests, and the Making of the Portuguese New State

Abstract

Fascist ideology held strong claims about the relationship between national soil and national community. It has been less noticed that this "ideology of the land" materialized in massive state campaigns that led to major environmental changes. This article examines three such campaigns undertaken by the New State, Portugal's fascist regime - the Wheat Campaign (1929), the Irrigation Plan (1935), and the Afforestation Plan (1938) - to demonstrate the importance of crops, dams, and forests to the institutionalization of fascism. It argues that paying attention to such topics, typical of environmental historians' narratives, suggests that instead of characterizing fascist regimes through the paradox of reactionary modernism, in which the ideology of the land constitutes the reactionary element, it is more productive to place intensive environmental management at the core of fascist modernist experiments.